Well, definitely a lot less in recoverable natural gas than the gas billionaires were telling us just a few months ago. Their claim then was that there was that there were 827 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas. This brought about a lot more drilling, which gave more accurate numbers for the supply. The Energy Information Administration’s 2012 estimate was down to 482 trillion cubic feet, a decrease of 40-odd percent. Some experts think it’s even less.

The most attractive source, the so-called Marcellus pool, which stretches from West Virginia to New York State and is a favorite of drillers because the product is available right next to the energy-greedy Northeast U.S., had its numbers reduced even more sharply, from 410 to 141 trillion cubic feet of gas, this a drop of more than 65 percent.

This entry was posted on December 23, 2012 under Science. Tagged Ecology.
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6 Comments

Jay Borcherding says:

I like the notion of the US being a net energy exporter by 2025, which serious analysts believe to be achievable.

Manufacturing and energy production represent real economic activity, with real jobs, much preferable to returning to an orgy of financial engineering, real estate speculation, and the like. We gotta make stuff again–providing an aging population with health care and selling each other imported good via retail and wholesale trade may generate trillions in economic activity every year, but its a hollow foundation for an economy to be built upon.

H. E. Parmer says:

The fact that fracking is only economically feasible because it’s been granted exemptions from all sorts of clean air and water regulations ought to raise a few warning flags. Given big energy’s historic regard for truthfulness and concern for the environment, though, there’s probably nothing to worry our pretty little heads about.

john miller says:

I don’t know if this is the explanation, but there is a difference between “reserves” and “recoverable”.

The reserve is a simple measurement of what people think is there.

The amount recoverable is dependent on economic factors such as the profitability of extraction. In South Africa, for instance, there are mounds of dirt next to the old gold mines which contain a lot of gold that was previously uneconomical to extract. Now, with the high price of gold and better technology, this dirt that was previously a waste product is now a new resource.

Of course, the very discovery of shale gas has depressed the price of gas and so what was previously recoverable would have decreased because of that factor alone.

I don’t know if your media is as meticulous in its terminology as ours in the UK (that is to say, not at all), but we had the same cold water poured on our news of discoveries of shale, and the above was the explanation.

John Mercouris says:

I don’t know how else to contact you, but I just wanted to say, I just finished reading Gateway, and it was a fantastic book. You know the quality of a book by how much it makes you think and feel. Cheers, from Naperville

Lamont Cranston says:

You could reduce demand for gas by providing people with an alternative to driving, the lack of Public Transport infrastructure in the USA is atrocious.
Whole cities exist that are entirely dependent on the automobile. That is unacceptable.
Or they figure single lightrail route a few miles long in the gentrified downtown will suffice for a sprawling city and suburbia of millions of people.

David Winfrey says:

Being myself chockfull of both gas and hubris, I submit the following:

Progress toward my projected Lensman sequel trilogy has paused, those works, put temporarily aside in creation a standalone spinoff novel, Spacewomen Off the Vortices, in which Chief Engineer Cleo Costigan and her Chief Engineering Mate, Annalitamora of Chickladoria, work to prepare their salvaged hangar-bay-cum-spaceship Westmible for a desperate, half-million-mile journey to the surviving battle-planet – one of an original force of fifty – which may or may not be the source of a spherical anti-radiation field, which alone maintains their lives against a sleet-storm of (relative to them) near-light dust.

The women are the sole survivors of the megadreadnought Inestimabile (to which Chris Kinnison’s Dauntless would be as a flitter), one of a hundred thousand of its class (and many another vessel alike) comprising the first of a projected dozen Fleets, intended for eventually station-keeping at the vertices of the First and Second galaxies; the First Fleet’s role, protection and support of Analtrix (technically – albeit sentimentally – the A8K8A; socially, inevitably, the Anal; ordinarily IGPOS-1), a vessel of like class built about the Cylinder of Projection, on which may be observed and studied (pending Interdiction of Waypoints by an Anal’s onboard crosstime field projectors) any number of parallel realities (said data originates not aboard, but in the lightyears-wide computer built about the core of Lundmark’s Nebula, which transmits in realtime via tightbeams).

Set upon (in a scene due incorporation into the third – I think – sequel novel) by the fifty world-ships, against which even its megas’ planet-shattering (“Death Star class”) primaries are useless, the Fleet flees along a constantly-variant course into trans-Local Group space (its spherical tractor-linked formation boosting its multi-element blast far past even its own members’ standard maximum); suffers in-flight “orbiting” by the world-ship armada, under whose ships’ thus-massed, two-thousand-odd mile wide (though luckily, singular) primaries Fleet’s screenships’ shielding begins to fail; drops inert, thus dispersing the attacking force by dint collision, and in the brief interim stutters repeatedly free and inert, so to build relativistic intrinsics via which globes of incoming megas put suicidal paid to every world-ship…save one, towards whose half-gone hulk my heroines – inextricably marooned well outside

…the Virgo Supercluster: one of millions of such in the observable universe
(or “Cosmic All,” as Lensman had it), itself composed of some one hundred
galactic groups and clusters, comprising in toto an assemblage some 33
megaparsecs – 110 million lightyears – across. Or perhaps it was some other
supercluster. They were a long, long, long way from home.

—then, for lack of better recourse, proceed.
More’s due to happen after that…twenty-eight chapters of more, to be specific, each one of which has at present title and some modicum of known content. Having in some wise succeeded, I think, in my middle-aged-adolescent goal of out-Smithing Smith, I now aim to subject ‘Lita and Cleo to seven successive levels of opposition and intrigue, concluding with their triumphant return to Civilization, and a tie-in to…whatever portion of whatever of the trilogy’s novels’ their story comes to tie in to (I haven’t quite gotten that worked out yet).

Knowing the book’s conclusion, much of how I aim to get there, I intend, upon its completion (more likely before, though piecemeal), returning my attention to the nascent trilogy, from one as-yet randomly-generated fragment of which (e.g., the Fleet’s battle) Starwomen, to my nonplussed delight, lately sprang. As has been intimated, I’m having immense – though quite possibly financially pointless – fun with this endeavor, the sole liability of which is a fast-developing (if not already full-blown, for which forgive me) instinct towards assuming the writing style of Smith. At worst, I’ll have my final four of a writer’s putative “six novels to be thrown away as practice” in the can, and be well-prepared to undertake other, less derivative epics of space. At best…well, that depends on both the blessings of the Smith estate, and the legal issues perhaps to be presented by J.M. Straczynski’s Lensman film franchise. In any case, I intend full well to write the damned things, subject each and every one of them to the most conclusive and complete critique of latter-day Galactic Roamers (and if possible, still-living First Fandom representatives), and, for lack of better recourse, put them online for the enjoyment(?) of one and all.